e5frog

Most Channel F carts use this method as well, only exception is some early series and prototypes (of course). They usually have two chips covered by a circular or square plastic cover glued to the PCB, these are either two 3851 PSU:s that could hold 1kB each or a 3853 SMI and some sort of (masked?) ROM chip in later cartridges.

I'd say it's not a WICO, since they usually have white top button and red handle. Bottom part of the base is also usually red... I think it's a WICO-copy.

Yes, there is about 55 - on that particular TV - with that unit... What shows in MESS is something of a maximum display, but even there some TV:s (unit combinations) display outside the MESS display also, not more than a row or so. I got the message, have only tested it briefly - noticed that the hex output is only nine bytes wide instead of the 20 that was before. It saves a little vertical space, but not as much as before. I'm getting an NTSC console this week, I'll hook it up and take a look at what differs on the displays.

Now that I've gotten my own eprom programmer I could try some things out on the real unit, I took photos of the TV displaying some Christmas related full screen pictures, and the smaller pictures are the corresponding MESS snapshots. Note that I have a PAL system. The tv-set photos got a little dark and has those curved distortions from top to bottom, but it gives an idea how it looks on a real unit. The original picture is to the far right... I'm guessing we should make our own thread instead of using FND's about his new Channel F page...

I recently discovered that my ITT Telematch Processor, which is closesly related to the Channel F II, had the same problem. I'm hoping it's just a ground wire that has come loose or something. I don't know about the Channel F II - are the buttons soldered directly on the PCB? I'm guessing you should check the circuitry, if you're lucky there's only some oxidation on a socketed chip. Buttons are read from port 0 - which is on the 3850 CPU, pin 5, 10, 11 and 16. Or something between them... Perhaps you are helped by studying the circuit schematics of VES at veswiki.com. There seems to be a 7404 circuit between the buttons and the CPU at least. This might be busted. Maybe you could connect signals directly to the port on the cpu, to check that this is OK. If it not - easiest way is probably to find another unit.

Is there a scan of the other page as well somewhere? Edit: Don't bother - I found it... x82fr2rs.jpg in the same directory. Are all your scans browse:able or must I guess the filenames? Edit2: I probably had a small brain malfunction, found this page and also noticed the spelling error in the header "BROUCHERS" http://fndcollectables.com/CHANNEL_F_INFO/.../brochures.html I only WISH I had all those too... Could you scan the RED brochure in some insanely high resolution and make it available to me? I'd like to get a close look at the keyboard controller - perhaps that would be a nice building project - that and programming Space Odyssey - as it looks in the screenshot. Perhaps the Galactic Space Wars/ Lunar Lander cartridge was meant to actually be a journey to the moon, shoot some enemies along the way and then land on the moon...

... but when they actually delivered it (eventually) they never called it Casino Royale, did they? I have only seen Casino Poker carts... Maybe it was meant to contain several games, but only poker got finished, so they renamed it and released it. Slot Machine would be the obvious choice for a Casino cartridge, and perhaps a re-run of Black Jack as well. I don't know if Checkers is really a Casino game but it seems to share the same silicon wafer as Slot Machine, early releases of Slot Machine and Checkers can be re-jumpered into either "Slot" or Checkers.

The problem with the VideoBrain is that it has no built-in programming language, and the one language available on cartridge, APL/S, is exceedingly rare. Also, the one option that would allow for saves, the Expander 1 unit, which essentially gave the computer the ports it would need, is probably even rarer. In short, there are two serious problems that need to be overcome in regards to the VideoBrain before anyone can even begin to make programming for the thing practical. Nevertheless, I'd be up for new product for either the VideoBrain or the Channel F, but considering the availability of the latter, my money would be on twenty things for the console before even one for the computer... Channel F has only 64 bytes of RAM, the other 2 kB is VRAM and is used to store what shows up on the screen, I'm not even sure it can be read again after being written to... Neither does Channel F have any built in programming language. But with DASM and a modified cart homebrews are a fact. Making software for VideoBrain should work as for the Channel F, start by dumping software, disassemble (f8tool on veswiki.com will probably work) study the code to figure out how to use graphics and such.... Seems to be more of a challenge than Channel F - oh yes. Unless VideoBrain has a 3853 SMI in the unit the cartridges are most likely the same type of PSU:s as for Channel F - I know Sean Riddle knows how to dump these, if it does have one - the carts are plain roms can be dumped quite easily. It would be interesting to see what's under the hood of one of those.

Cool! I have never seen a Channel F with a "Jet-Stick" though - and Casino Poker is mentioned (again) as Casino Royale... Perhaps these were only plans that never happened. Never seen a unit with that bright eject-button either... I've seen the button on a Video Command Joystick however.

Has anyone called?

You did an excellent job, now it works wonderfully! The original MESS colors differs a lot from what a real unit produces on screen, using the modified MESS (modified by Sean Riddle, which also has improved sound) - being download-able from http://veswiki.com there's the ability to set a palette file. It's called chfpal.dat, and is simply a binary file of 3x8 bytes. By measuring color values from screenshots made with a video capture card and comparing to a few different tv-sets I have come to the conclusion that a second generation Channel F has approximately this palette: black: 16/16/16 white: 252/252/252 green: 2/204/93 red: 255/49/83 blue: 75/63/243 gray: 224/224/224 light green: 145/255/166 light blue: 206/208/255 A first generation console differs a bit as far as I have seen, main differences is that the blue is a little darker and the red is more orange. Picture on a first generation unit are usually sharper as well but that's beside the point. I made these wonderful pictures today: These are snapshots from MESS, as you can see they use the palette above. Great work Kurt!!

Veswiki has moved to http://veswiki.com I added up the cycle time of the operations needed to plot a single point into Channel F VRAM, it takes 24 cycles, not counting the delay needed for the older system. But you could use the delay time for other things I guess, like reloading the scratchpad registers with new data perhaps...

I translated the bitmap data according to the translating table above (note that Red was coded correctly ) The result was a lot better:

I unfortunately lost my picture drawing code (all that wasn't posted here) and sat tonight and rebuilt some of it. Tried the code Kurt produced from the converter software and it unfortunately looks awful... It's supposed to be like this: green 00, red 01, blue 10, background 11 Reading the first line of the IK+ picture, data in your post says 00000000 - which means green, but turns white with B&W palette... it should have been 11 - background colored. Looking further in the picture the blue water is background colored - grey instead. Which means what should have been 10 is 11 instead... Snippet from the IK+ data gfx.multicolor.data: .byte % 00000000, % 00000000, % 00000000, % 00000000, % 00000000, % 00000000, % 00000000 .byte % 00000000, % 00000000, % 00000000, % 00000000, % 00000000, % 00000000, % 00000000 .byte % 00000000, % 00000000, % 00000000, % 00000000, % 00000000, % 00000100, % 01000000 .byte % 00000001, % 00000000, % 00000000, % 00000000, % 00001110, % 11101110, % 11100110 Patterns look right, but colors are not. Translation: IS SHOULD BE 00 11 11 10 10 00 Then everything should be OK.

VESwiki has reappeared at a new address: http://veswiki.com

VESwiki has reappeared at a new address: http://veswiki.com

I got all the components traced out, but now the text is taking forever. Not to mention I already did a significant portion of text without antialiasing, so the font is large and blocky : ( Hope that's okay. Also, the scan destroyed some of the component labels. Do you have the original sheets? I may need to ask for a couple numbers later when I get to those parts. Nope - don't have the original sheets...

I mean it - go right ahead. It would be nice to print out the second sheet as well and poster it on the wall.

Thanks - I'm sure that head-author "Blackbird" is as happy as I am to hear this. It's even better with Channel F II sound, the modified version of MESS can be downloaded from here: http://w5.nuinternet.com/s660100106/files/...th_debugger.zip As you can see from the file-name it also has the debugger (I think it needs to be turned on in one of the ini-files to be able to use it) and another special thing about it is the palette-file which lets you set the colors in a binary file - correcting the colors to look more natural. Latest VES Pac-man binary: http://w5.nuinternet.com/s660100106/files/...elf/pac-man.bin

Jess... if you have a new tv-set they don't always like these old machines, try running the signal through a VCR or on an older TV... Hope you get it to work.

FND has a page: http://www.fndcollectables.com/CHANNEL_F.&...;/1_thru_5.html I also have one: http://go.to/channelf

Yes, a simple transistor amplifier might be sufficient, I'll look into it after October 7th...

Here's the complete instruction book: Here's the BARCO system manual: Here's BARCO cart 1 complete set:

The BARCO instructions are dual language, printed up-side-down when you flip it over.

Donkey Kong would be great... Go for it! Any "Game & Watch" game should be quite easily managed as well... even easier with Blackbird's routines - the tile routine for graphics, multi-blit drawing and such. Perhaps it would be possible even to fit several games into a 8kB (-7 bytes) Multi-Cart slot... All it takes is one dedicated person and perhaps someone to help him - and a lot of time - I think VES Pac-man has been in the works for three years now - or is it four? I'd like an improved version of Tetris, as I describe it on my competition page: http://w5.nuinternet.com/s660100106/competition/index.html (My Fairchild System gallery will appear in a pop-up window) The latest version speeds up to quick and the blocks do not appear in "lowest profile" which makes it darn difficult to place a 4x1 block in the side position when the board is half full... I managed to change it by swapping the block-graphics around, but that screwed up the preview as the blocks don't fit (in the space left between the two playfields) unless they're in "upright" position. I guess it can be hacked further if disassembled and re-coded, but that's a lot of work and Peter Trauner might object... Too bad he doesn't want to release the code. :-( Edit: spelling mistake